The Ecology of Archaeology
Did we really say that? How pretentious. I suppose we are really talking about the study of plants which love growing on walls but, as archaeological work often provides such walls (both vertical and horizontal), there is a strong connection between rock loving flora and excavations. Tourists who love plants and history/prehistory get a double dose of excitement.
Last year, we sent you postcards from mainland Italy and Sicily, featuring the flora growing on the ruins of Pompeii and the Parco Archaeologico della Neapolis, in Siracusa. This year we ventured to Greece, also rich in archaeology of course, but which offers a different collection of wild flowers, lichens and ferns. As we only got back a few days before blog posting day, we thought you might like a kind of appetiser, a Greek salad perhaps, before offering you the main course moussaka in a couple of weeks.
Northern Greece was showery and cloudy, an atmosphere which did not deter either the flowers or the botanists. The swards and rocky nooks and crannies provided a plethora (a word partly borrowed from the Greek, apparently) of plant delights – and identity challenges.
Right: Nafpaktos Castle with botanists at work
Image below: surely not a gentian? No - sufficient knee work and app use suggests an Alkanet (Anchusa undulata?) Both images © M Chilvers
Some of the wall plants with which we are so familiar in Britain are also stalwarts (stalworts?) in Greece. Ivy leaved toad flax (below left), navelwort (the flower spike, not the leaves behind it, below centre) and pellitory of the wall can all be found embedded in all sorts of cracks and crevices.
Garden escapes are also familar and frequent components of the habitat. Even a fig can squeeze into tight space, when absolutely necessary.
Other flowers were less familair but well worth the effort of trying to identify them. And by the way, if we have mis-identified (or mis-spelled) any of these plants, please let us know.
Below left to right: salsify (Tragapogon porrifolius), giant fennel (Ferula communis) and Campanula ramosisissima. And not fogetting, at the top of this post, the tiny, delicate flowers of Micromeria graeca, clinging grimly to a wall.
Ferns, mosses, lichens and liverworts inhabit damper and or shadier areas.
Less cramped spaces were populated with the sort of plant which can quickly get a toe-hold in rough but ready places. Here we have sow thistle, poppies, yellow hop trefoil and purple (winter?) vetch, with (lower row) the gloriously named basket of gold (Aurinia saxitilis), Arabian pea and bladder vetch, not quite ready to flower.
More fertile places with deeper and/or damper soil provided a cornucopia of colour and form. It is hard to justify including such beauties in a blog post supposedly devoted to walls and rocky places but we did find them in a museum devoted to industrial archaeology…
A welcome please to cut leaved self heal, a pyramidal orchid and - oh - a wreath of Laurus nobilis, the laurel with which the Romans crowned their Olympians and which we just put in our casseroles.
